Gothic Tiles

My younger sister nicked my camera once again, so I had to scan it. My older sister found it while she was clearing out her room. I was scared that the weight would break my scanner...

It's a set of 'gothic tiles' I made in Ceramics while I was at college in 2004. I believe I used white buff clay and black slip. It was my input for a project in which we all had to make about four gothic tiles, making sure they 'repeated' when put against each other. At the beginning of the project, my class visited the Victoria and Albert Gallery in London, as there was an exhibition of gothic art going on there.

The thing was that I thought this was for Critical Studies, my least favourite aspect of my art course, so I took my Crit studies sketchbook instead of my Ceramics one. Nevertheless, I still drew a few of the artworks at the exhibition, and bought some postcards. If only I had both sketchbooks still, I would have scanned some pages and showed them off. If I ever do find them, I will.

When we actually got round to making the tiles, we has to make three kinds - the ones shown here, some flat tiles using red buff clay with markings all over them I believe, and white buff clay tiles with the first letter of our names on. Being called Stacey and all, mine had the letter S, and we made them look gothic too. We had to make all these bumps on these, and I didn't even know what I was doing, so I just shaped the top of the tile randomly, and my teacher thought it was a great example! Heh, the thigns you get when you don't know what you're doing eh... I coloured that tile with zinc oxide I believe - it came out green, and I'm pretty sure magnesium [or was it managnese?] oxide makes clay go dark brown... Both that and the red tile were possibly lost...shame, I would have shown you the S tile, because I was bloody proud of it.